


on the nature of connor in small places

by orphan_account



Category: Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)
Genre: Light Angst, Mild Hurt/Comfort, Sensory Overload
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-29
Updated: 2018-09-29
Packaged: 2019-07-20 06:26:20
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,688
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16131536
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Hank and the negligible string of code that induces stasis in androids.





	on the nature of connor in small places

**Author's Note:**

  * For [PinkAxolotl85](https://archiveofourown.org/users/PinkAxolotl85/gifts), [Crescentjasper](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Crescentjasper/gifts).



Hank has been sober for six weeks.

He's cashed in his chip. He doesn't sweat like he used to. His hands have stopped shaking. He sleeps through most nights. There's a little bit of cash burning a hole at the bottom of the jar Connor makes him put a dollar in whenever he feels like a drink. And for the first time in a long time, Hank doesn't feel like chasing the bottom of a bottle. Instead, he feels like celebrating.

He figures, since his family is getting bigger, that he'll spend the spoils on a sofa fit for a giant. But it turns out that furniture shopping with an android is a headache. Hank listens to Connor drone on and on about fabric choices and foot traffic and the dimensions of his living room and the space between the hypothetical sofa and the coffee table for three whole days. His neck begins to ache from nodding along and pretending to listen.

Hank gets that, strictly speaking, his partner is an expensive computer dressed in a shirt and tie and that computers, _well,_ they compute things. But Connor has this maddening need to quantify _everything_. Hank was ready to give up on the idea and spend the cash on a midwinter voyage to the Southern pole of inaccessibility because it'd be less of an ordeal.

On the fourth day, Connor begins to bring his bad back and middle age into the equation so Hank orders the comfiest, softest sofa he can find out of spite. The two of them transfer the old sofa to the garage despite Connor's insistence that he can see to it himself. When they set it down, Hank takes one last look at its dents and worn edges and it feels oddly profound.

"I'm sad to see her go, I feel like I should say a few words." He'd toast it, were there any drinks in the house.

"Your tendency to develop emotional attachments to objects hasn't gone unnoticed," Connor states unsympathetically, rolling his sleeves back down. "But it's just a sofa."

"And you're just a bucket of bolts. Come help me move the rest of the stuff, would you?"

Hank walks haltingly back into the living room, trying to work the knot out of his back and Connor hums lowly as he follows suit.

"You should have let me take care of it. You shouldn't strain yourself."

"Quit it. You're making me feel old."

Connor accounts for almost every possibility but he wasn't anticipating a panic to be born of the naked space where the sofa was. His mental map of Hank's home is askew. There is a obvious space that should be occupied but _isn't_. He feels like he is back in the zen garden, with the shrieking wind belting the snow up and no shelter and no object to hide under. He feels like he is losing control on the top of a shipping container with the world's eyes on him and nobody to hold onto. Then the noise sets in and Connor is a city with too many people.

He hears each sound independently and all at once. The vibrations within the filament of the kitchen lights. The fabric of Hank's clothes as he moves. The sound of his thumb over his index finger. The quickening tattoo of his thirium pump. The sound of his processor flitting from the sting of the lights. The subtle timbres in the TV host's voice. Sumo's licence rattling as he bounds across the kitchen floor. He reduces the input but the lappet in his throat clicks mutely as he gulps down air too thick to swallow.

His clothes are fitted and taut like a noose and with every passing second they get tighter and tighter until he bursts apart, composite of metal and far too much information. His shirt becomes a sanding belt. He is iron filings. His foundations crack audibly like Hank's joints as he drags the boxes across the floor. Connor feels every fibre of the carpet part beneath the cardboard and the walls of his body are folding in on themselves.

He is suddenly mad -- very mad. He is repulsed by the sensation of his fingers brushing against each other as they form a neat fist and the way his joints move in his sockets. He feels the electricity coursing through his body and the brunt of the pressure maintained as the Thirium circulates freely through his system. He can't see but his peripheral vision is sharp as knives and it hurts his teeth.

Everything overwhelms his systems and he has to manually breathe in, breathe out, and breathe in again. He goes limp at the sting of pseudo-pain in that permeates at the surface of his skin with every sound.

"Are you even listening to me, Connor?" Hank calls. "Connor!"

The weight of his senses is too much to sustain. Connor stands and watches his body reach out and clutch at Hank's shirt with trembling hands. He wants Hank to hold him but everything is too loud.

"Talk to me." Hank pulls him into a stabling hug and Connor can count the dips and hills of his calloused hands, the cracks in his fingernails. He is imbued with bergamot, salt, acetone, tobacco and cotton. A whirlwind tour of the sum of Hank's parts.

"It's-" Connor feels the syllable vibrate through his teeth and can not stomach any more sounds.

"Too much?" Hank's voice is restrained and uncomfortably low in a way it only ever is when he gets like this.

Connor wants to claw at the places Hank's words stain the plastic, he wants to put an impossible distance between himself and the room. Hank doesn't wait for Connor to nod his head yes. He knows him too well. He just forewarns him that he'll pick him up and he dips his hands beneath his knees and arms and the sudden contact nags at him like a continuous roar, like a paper cut. 

Hank's fingertips ghost boring holes wherever they roam. He wants, more than anything, to be put down but nothing is quiet enough to justify the exertion of asking. His gyroscope tells his head to spin. A creeping exhaustion weighs down on his bones and traps him in his partner's arms and he shuts his eye against the dim banshee lights.

The sound of the door hitting the sink splinters like the crack of a rifle.

Hank's bathroom is far too small to harvest any amount of chaos. Navigating these occasional paroxysms takes a bit of creativity on Connor's part and when Hank is at work, he has has taken to spending a few solitary moments in the snug android-sized nook between the bath and the basin. If he folds in on himself, he slots in perfectly like it was made to made to envelop him. There is even enough room for Sumo's face at his feet if he is in the mood for company.

Connor has bioremediation faculties, he is built to restore scenes, to remove contaminated materials, and make them safe and healthy. He knows no laxness. Thankfully, the bathroom is as sterile and as lifeless as an assembly floor, sobering white against white and no loud colours.

Hank deposits him in the bath like he knows and his arena encompasses him from all sides like an impersonal hug. Sensation lingers on his skin, acrid and damp. This is his sanctum to practice temporal counting, to push his back up against the unoffensive level porcelain and her lustre (even in the dark). He accounts for time passing by enumerating his breaths, sixteens times a minute no matter what, in-and-out like he was programmed to.

It's like being in statis again: factory fresh, dark rooms, dimmed lights and clipped tongues. He feels safe, enclosed, surrounded and reassured by its one possible entrance and the wealth of his potential. It's a veiled and bizarre string of code that wills him into enclosed spaces and calms him down, as natural as birds flocking south in the winter and the curvature of the Earth.

Androids may not need sleep but Connor is exhausted from the constant chatter thronging his processor and he shuts his eyes. Hank closes the door behind him and creates a vaccum. The silence spreads like hot tarmac across a road. Devoid of sound, the walls are a barrier against the world outside shivering with laughter and lights. There is blissful nothing but the low buzzing he always gives off and the swift rotations of his processor and his LED just visible, an angry red melting into a comfortable daffodil yellow like spring snow.

Hank sits with his back against the wall beyond the bathroom door and imagines stress causing grey hair to emerge rapidly on his partner's head and it is not normal. Nothing about this is normal: not what is for all intents and purposes a grown man skulking in his tub like a six-year-old during a storm or a computer that costs more than his house short circuiting because of some open space in his room or playing house with a robot at all.

Hank collects some blankets then whisks through wordy scientific articles about the logic of androids and tight spaces, some shit about storage and transport and safety precautions. Then he reads forum posts about androids in closets and beneath beds, gets mad about the score and succumbs to videos of cats slotting themselves into snug shoeboxes and cardboard containers and he even laughs a little. After twenty minutes, there's a dull click as Connor emerges like a sleepy monster, hair on end, rubbing at his face like he is emerging from a long sleep.

"Better?" he asks, handing him a comforter.

"Better."

Hank watches his partner pull the blanket around himself and decides that ultimately, Connor is reacting like anyone would when their level of security is pulled out from beneath their feet. And if it takes a bathtub to supersede that intrinsic fear of the unknown, of the new, of the change that all people face, then so be it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> a product of discord conversations about androids in bathtubs.
> 
> thanks for reading, for feedback and for kudos. ☆


End file.
